Monday, December 14, 2015

Did you
google today and observe that different‘0’ in Google !! ~ a
search takes us to articles in Independent.co.uk; Telegraph.co.uk., BBC,
Huffington Post – and all of them on a man who passed away last year, who would
have been 97 today.

It is Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar, born in 1918
into a poor family in southern India - one of 13 children, of whom only 10
survived. He was sickly as a child - suffering from malaria and typhoid - and
was introduced to yoga by a brother-in-law who ran a school in Mysore as part
of an effort to restore his health. At
the age of 18 Iyengar became a teacher in the city of Pune, practising what he
called an "art and science". His career was to last more than than eight decades. In Pune he taught Menuhin. The music maestro
had complained that he could not relax or sleep, but in an interview with the
veteran India broadcaster Sir Mark Tully in 2001, Guru Iyengar said “within one
minute”, he was “snoring happily away”. The violinist was so impressed that he
invited his guru to Switzerland in 1954.
It was the break that launched him on the West, and visits to the US and
the rest of Europe followed. Aldous
Huxley, the author, was another of his famed disciples.

www.independent.co.uk writes : BKS Iyengar: Four
facts you need to know about the yoga guru behind today's Google Doodle. Those four interesting facts are
:

1.His
brother-in-law was known as the “father of modern yoga” : In
1934, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya first invited his young, sickly brother-in-law
to train with him in what was then the kingdom of Mysore (now Karnataka state)
in southern India to improve his health. Krishnamacharya was one of the key figures
behind the revival of “hatha yoga” - from which Iyengar yoga developed - in the
early 20th century which focused on the correct alignment of the body.

2. He owed his international success to an
American violinist :
In 1952, Yehudi Menuhin befriended BKS Iyengar. Menuhin believed doing
yoga improved his playing and invited him to Switzerland with him in 1954. After that visit, Iyengar travelled frequently
to the west to demonstrate his special technique and hundreds of Iyengar yoga
centres sprang up around the world.

3. He
taught the 85-year-old Queen Elisabeth of Belgium how to do a headstand
: Iyengar was first introduced to the
dowager Queen in 1958 and she told him she wanted to learn how to do his
signature sirasana headstand. She gave him a bust of his head which she had
sculpted herself. In 1965, he visited her again to help her regain some control
of her movements after she suffered a stroke at 92.

4. His
children became celebrated yoga teachers as well : His
eldest daughter Geeta and his son Prashant have become internationally renowned
yoga practitioners and now run the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute -
which BKS Iyengar founded in 1975 in honour of his late wife. He also trained
his granddaughter, Abhijata Sridhar Iyengar as a yoga teacher for many years
and she now teaches at the institute and abroad.

photo credit : huffington post.

Bellur
Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar (1918 – 2014), better known as B.K.S.
Iyengar, authored many books on yoga
practice and philosophy including Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama, Light on
the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and Light on Life. The Indian government awarded Iyengar the Padma
Shri in 1991, the Padma Bhushan in 2002 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2014. In 2004, Iyengar was named one of the 100 most
influential people in the world by Time magazine.

Iyengar supported
nature conservation, donated Rs. 2 million to Chamarajendra Zoological Gardens,
Mysore, thought to be the largest donation by an individual to any zoo in
India. Iyengar helped promote awareness
of multiple sclerosis with the Pune unit of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of
India. His most important charitable project involved
donations to his ancestral village of Bellur, in the Kolar district of Karnataka.
Through a trust fund that he established, he led a transformation of the
village, supporting a number of charitable activities there. He built a
hospital, India's first temple dedicated to Sage Patanjali, a free school that
supplies uniforms, books, and a hot lunch to the children of Bellur and the
surrounding villages, a secondary school, and a college.